NASA’s next generation of space suit—the agency’s first in 20 years—will look familiar to fans of computer-generated cartoon classic Toy Story.That’s because the new white and green Z-1 suit bears more than a passing resemblance to the interstellar hero Buzz Lightyear. The prototype suit was revealed in a host of pictures uploaded today to photo-sharing website Flickr, and it boasts trim of the same hue as that worn by the space ranger action figure. A large hemispherical transparent dome covering the wearer’s head also looks remarkably similar to that worn by Buzz—although the latest pictures do not make clear if...

NASA just awarded its future spacesuit contract to Oceaneering International. The US firm must now design, test, and produce two suits -- the default suit (pictured after the break) worn on-board for launch and landing and a second, more versatile, cheese-proof suit worn during space walks and upon the surface of the moon. The suits must be ready for the first scheduled launch of the Orion Space Capsule in 2015. The contract is valued at the government special price of just $745 million. Hey, we have to keep up appearances at the International Space Station, you know.

May 4, 2007 — An unemployed former aerospace engineer has built a better spacesuit glove, claiming the first payoff in the NASA-backed Centennial Challenges competition. Peter Homer clinched a $200,000 prize in this week's Astronaut Glove Competition with a spacesuit glove that proved more comfortable, durable and flexible than gloves currently used by spacewalking astronauts. NASA turned to cash-prize competitions in an effort to solve some of its technical problems with low-cost, innovative solutions. Homer, for example, bought most of the materials for his gloves at local shops in his hometown of Southwest Harbor, Maine, and on eBay, said Alan...

GRAND FORKS, N.D. - Students and faculty from five North Dakota colleges will unveil a prototype Mars spacesuit this weekend in the Badlands. Students from the University of North Dakota, North Dakota State, Dickinson State, the state College of Science in Wahpeton and Turtle Mountain Community College in Belcourt designed the experimental suit with a $100,000 NASA grant. Students on Saturday will don the suit and test it in the rugged Badlands terrain, which resembles the rocky surface of Mars, said project manager Pablo de Leon, an aerospace engineer at UND. "Our college students here in North Dakota can do...

ONE of the more interesting things that John Kerry has done in 30 years in American politics is a stint as the No 2 to Michael Dukakis as Governor of Massachusetts.Like much of the nonmilitary part of his CV, however, this period has been little mentioned in the 2004 presidential campaign. Indeed, poor Mr Dukakis has been noticeable by his complete absence from this year’s contest, airbrushed out of Democratic history like an early Bolshevik in Stalin’s Russia. The 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush is now universally acknowledged to have been among the most jaw-droppingly inept...

HAS John Kerry just blundered into his own Dukakis moment? Of all the lessons learned by Democrats after Michael Dukakis’s disastrous 1988 presidential run, one has been seared into the party’s campaign rulebook like no other: avoid goofy outfits. The defining image of the Dukakis defeat to George Bush Sr was the ruinous decision to stick the diminutive Massachusetts governor in an M1 battle tank, his head swamped by an oversize helmet, in an attempt to portray him as a tough-guy defence hawk. He looked like a schoolboy rather than a fearless commander-in-chief, and a nation guffawed. Mr Dukakis never...